A common way to steal products in retails stores through barcode substitution. A customer substitutes a less expensive item's barcode onto a more expensive item as its barcode. When this occurs at attendant assisted Point-Of-Sale (POS) terminals, the attempted theft is frequently missed because the attendants often scan too quickly or are unware of the actual item that they are scanning. Furthermore, when this is done by a customer operating a Self-Service Terminal (SST) detecting the theft in real time is particularly difficult.
Verifying a correct barcode for an item being scanned during a checkout requires a visual analysis of the item versus item information associated with the attached barcode. Prior attempts to solve the problem have focused on image recognition on the item, which is compared against a model image for the item associated with the attached barcode.
One problem with such approaches is that the image processing is time consuming and has to rely on estimations based on sampled pixels from the captured image or the item being scanned. This is not an ideal situation and current approaches take a significant amount of processing time, which can slow down transaction throughput at the checkout terminal.
As a result, barcode substitution remains a significant source of theft in the industry and there is a need for a more processor efficient and time efficient approach to item validation during checkout preventing theft.